Paying Back Jack (11 page)

“Bring it black, bring it strong,” said Tracer.

The waitress stared long and hard, like she had some problem.

“The man wants a coffee,” said Jarrett. “Is there any part of that message you don't understand?”

She turned away and walked over to the coffee pot.

“You're in a good mood.” Tracer slid onto the stool next to Jarrett. “Rain got you down?”

“How was Waters?”

“He didn't make his flight.”

“You didn't expect him to,” said Jarrett.

“Mooney had all the details. There wasn't much for Waters to do. Shake hands and calm down Mooney.”

“And you could do that?”

“Got that right. Mooney had me meet him in a bar with two of the most movement-challenged dancers I've ever seen. Looked like they were made of stone. Mooney was their only customer. Apparently he owned the place, so he wasn't exactly a customer.”

“That's the point. You control the perimeter. An ideal place. I can see why Mooney chose it. No one coming in or out in the middle of your business. Just the two of you talking about the old times.”

The waitress delivered Tracer's mug of coffee.

“Mooney said we've got three days before he comes personally to get his weapons.”

“You scared, Tracer? I don't find myself in fear of Mooney.”

Tracer blew on his coffee before taking a sip.

Jarrett was in a work phase, and when he worked he avoided coffee, tea, and alcohol. Chemicals cause a reaction in the human body, change the reflexes, vision, depth perception. A drunk doesn't last long in combat. Jarrett's military training kicked in, and he told himself he didn't miss the coffee—until, of course, he saw Tracer enjoying a cup, smacking his lips. Jarrett promised himself a pot of fresh brew once the job was done. He liked giving himself a reward for completing a mission.

While waiting for Tracer, Jarrett had been watching a middle-aged farang with a young woman at a table in the back. The woman looked like an office worker. The farang had eaten wolfishly, downing his bacon and eggs in big gulps, soaking his toast in the egg yolk. The ying had slowly sipped Chinese tea. He wore a suit and a tie, and she wore a short skirt and a blouse with creases on the sleeve sharp enough to cut butter, and she showed a bit of style with a pair of pearl earrings large enough to indicate she had experience in prying open large oysters. Not too much makeup—but who wore makeup at 6:00 a.m.?—and she had that self-confident, determined way of sitting, listening to the farang rattle on but not committing her expression to one emotion or another. Jarrett glanced at the time.

“We've got lots of time,” said Tracer.

“Time is the one thing no one has lots of.”

Tracer nodded as if to concede the point. “Just let me finish my coffee. I've had a long drive. Tell me, how did it go with Miss Honey Bee last night?”

“It was all milk and honey.” As they'd lain together in bed, Wan had told him how she'd sneak up on the hives, sit down, and watch the bees for hours. She watched them dance. In the darkness of the room she'd stroked his bare chest and said that when you understand the meaning of their dance, you learn something about nature. All the dancing was communicating important information: the distance to food, the direction, the force of the prevailing winds. At the bar, she'd watch the yings dance, looking for some pattern, some directional indicator toward the honey. She'd said there was a lot to learn from watching bees dance.

“She seemed different from the others,” said Tracer.

“I never met anyone in a bar like her.”

Tracer ordered him another orange juice. “You have any idea how much orange juice I drank in Pattaya?”

Jarrett shrugged. The pained expression on Tracer's face made Jarrett smile.

“A gallon and a half at least,” said Tracer.

“Your eyeballs must be floating.”

“Don't worry. There's nothing wrong with either my bladder or my eyes.”

Jarrett needed to have his spotter's eyes sharp and focused, checking out the target and the perimeter around it. He needed Tracer at the top of his form, and Tracer was giving his usual reassurances. “No problems in Pattaya?”

“The only hiccup was driving in yesterday on Beach Road—the traffic. If you'd have told me the cars were backed up to the Cambodian border, I'd have not called you a liar. Nothing was moving. I edged along for half an hour until I finally saw the problem. There were cops and reporters and a dead Thai woman on the driveway in front of a hotel. They had a sheet over her. But people kept pulling it back for the TV cameras. I rolled down my window and asked someone what had happened. Young Thai guy says a woman's done killed herself. I say to myself, baby, if I'd been there two hours earlier and we'd had a drink, listened to the blues, I could've talked you into living.”

“Life doesn't always let you choose your dance partners,” said Jarrett.

“Where'd you read that?”

Jarrett cracked a smile. “Miss Honey Bee said that.”

Tracer raised an eyebrow. “That girl's workin' her mojo on you.”

The smile on Jarrett's face widened. “Yeah, that crossed my mind.”

More than once, Tracer's Louisiana
gris-gris,
a homegrown mojo, had shown some power to defeat an enemy or to entice a friend.

He glanced over at the ying at the table with her farang boyfriend. It occurred to him that if Wan had the tailoring and makeup, she wouldn't look much different. Where was the dividing line between the ying who watched bees dancing and an office worker sipping tea at six in the morning? Weren't they both harvesting as much honey as they could while the flowers bloomed?

A SLICK FILM of oil coated the wet street. A red and blue Honda 150cc came out of nowhere. The rider had a black helmet with flames along the sides and a tinted visor pushed back on his head. He wore the motorcycle taxi uniform—cheap plastic sandals, faded blue jeans, and an unbuttoned orange vest over a Liverpool football T-shirt. He steered with one hand and held a cell phone to his ear with the other. Calvino slammed on the brakes, made a hard left and clipped the rear left side of a Mercedes parked in front of Bourbon Street. The motorcycle driver lost his cell phone, frantically pulled out of a freefall, regained control, and opened the throttle. He turned, drove back, picked up his cell phone, and cursed and spat at Calvino.

Calvino sat at the wheel for a full minute before he reversed and pulled into the empty parking spot next to the Mercedes. He closed his eyes and remembered the two men on the motorcycle spinning out of control, their bike slamming against the cargo of gas cylinders, the explosion, the burning bike cart wheeling into the base of the banyan tree. That hadn't been an accident. He'd caused them to die. Calvino's stomach churned, upset and angry. He'd just come close to killing another man on a motorcycle. He looked at his hands. They were shaking. He tried to steady himself by gripping down hard on the steering wheel. He told himself it wasn't his fault that the motorcycle had been going the wrong way, the driver not paying attention. On the bright side, maybe his luck had turned.

Getting out of the car, Calvino squatted down beside the Benz and examined the license plate. Diplomatic plates, he said to himself. He didn't recognize the country from the first two digits. He shook his head, running his hand over the dent along the rear left-hand side. Calvino sucked in a deep breath and told himself it was time to find out which embassy personnel were either just leaving the Square or had just arrived.

A Benz in front of Bourbon Street early in the morning looked out of place. Calvino rubbed his hands together thinking. The day before he had been in Pattaya—now a lifetime ago. Some flecks of scraped-off paint clung to his palms. He sighed, rubbed his hands on his trousers, and wished he were someplace else, like his own bed. This time of the morning was for the dead, not the living, he told himself. And he told himself no more playing around with customs and cultural beliefs that could come back to haunt him. He'd do the right thing; he'd go inside the restaurant, do his job, and when he was done he'd settle with the Benz owner. It was a rare morning in Washington Square that Calvino faced a dual threat of a punch up.

As he walked in, he concentrated on his job: positioning himself and getting a couple of photographs of the client's husband and his Thai girlfriend. He looked around the room. The pair—the reason for his being in the Square—were seated at a far table. The ying perfectly fit the wife's description, pretty in a short dress, blinking eyelashes, and lipstick that matched the color of her fingernails. Like most women, this one seemed to possess the ability coordinate a large inventory of color, gesture, makeup, and dress; no man could match that level of skill. The bar was empty except for a couple of guys sitting side by side, one drinking coffee and the other orange juice. He figured one of them owned the Benz. It wasn't the farang at the table in the corner; Calvino knew he was a stockbroker and not a diplomat.

Neither one of the men paid him much attention. The one with intense green eyes and the hint of a knowing smile had looked at him for a moment and turned away. The guy who had the build of a professional athlete kept looking straight ahead. He'd tried to remember the last time he'd seen men so fit in the Square, and shrugged when he drew a blank. That they had ignored him was just the way Calvino liked it. Jarrett sat with an empty glass on the counter in front of him
and Tracer cradled a cup of coffee with those hands that he could catch a football with in his sleep. Calvino was trying to decide if one of the men was an ambassador, or if they were a couple of third secretary types.

The Doors' “L.A. Woman” played in the background, and when it ended, Jeff Buckley's “Mojo Pin” picked up the beat. Tracer tapped out the rhythm on the side of his coffee mug. The music was another reason Tracer had chosen Bourbon Street as a place to meet before going off to do their mission. It was one of the agreements Jarrett and Tracer had made early on; whoever got to the restaurant first would request that they play the blues. Music was like a slice of bread; it soaked up all the anxiety that settled in a man's gut when time seemed to slow to a crawl. The blues entertained the first man to arrive, cooled him down until a little chill quivered up his spine. It was more than casual listening. The blues isn't casual; it's in your face, your heart, your groin. A good blues song has the power to sweep away stressful thoughts about things going wrong. Jarrett loved the blues. His favorite blues song was in the queue, and it was about the price people paid.

“There's a price to pay / always a price to pay / you don't know how much until you break it.” He thought there was more than a little piece of God's truth to shake out of those words. Hang those words out on the line to dry; watch them soak up the sun. Jarrett had been taught that most of the time what you broke fell into two pieces, and you could glue them back together; but other times it broke into a million pieces, and no amount of glue was going to put it back together again. Like death, some broken things just can't be fixed.

The farang at the far table had turned and was staring at Calvino. It was time to reverse order. Calvino needed a beard, and the owner of the Benz was the guy who'd supply it.

“One of you guys own the Benz out front?” Calvino still hadn't figured out the country code, and the appearance of the two men gave no real clue as to nationality.

Tracer cocked his head to the side. “What's the problem?”

An American accent, thought Calvino. “From the plates, you're with an embassy. Maybe a diplomat.” Each embassy plate had a distinctive number.

Tracer liked that, the thought of being a diplomat, and his mother would have been proud, so he shot a smile. “And what are you selling?”

“I'm not selling anything. But I hit the back of your car.”

Tracer's eyebrow rose up. He smiled. “You're shitting me. You ran into my car?”

“The damage is minor. I've got insurance.”

“Minor? That's okay. Don't worry about it.”

Tracer put money on the counter and started to stand up. “If you will excuse us.”

But Calvino blocked his path. Jarrett stopped a couple of inches away, looking straight at him.

“Don't worry about it,” said Jarrett. “If it's broken, I'll get it fixed.”

Calvino made it clear that he insisted on dealing with the damage. “Give me a couple of seconds. Then I can deal with it.”

The farang at the corner table had stopped looking over at the bar and scanning the room the way guilty men do. He felt he'd gotten away with his cake and now was the time to take a big bite. He held the girl's hand, stroking it, playing with it, kissing her knuckles, his lips against the high-gloss pink fingernails. They were the kind of pink that shades the sky early on a Bangkok morning. Calvino decided this farang was a real piece of work. Seeing the man slobbering over his girlfriend's hand early in the morning made Calvino wonder what kind of nightmare the man had escaped from under his own roof to push him into Washington Square that time of day. Anyway, that was his problem, and besides, his wife was paying the shipping and handling for photographs of his knuckle-licking antics. Calvino reached inside his jacket pocket for his small digital camera. As he removed his hand, Jarrett with the speed of a sand-trap spider grabbed his wrist, tightened his grip. There was no question about the muscles behind the vicelike embrace. They exchanged a long, hard look.

“You're the bodyguard?”

His broad shoulders flexed. “Bring your hand out of your jacket real slow,” said Jarrett.

Calvino showed him the black Nikon. “It's a digital camera.”

Jarrett released Calvino's wrist. Calvino pointed the camera at the couple across the room, who weren't paying them any attention. He
snapped a series of photos, capturing one hand kiss, then another, until he had enough to show that the farang was more than a little interested in the ying sitting at the table. A couple of lovers caught stealing a few moments from the start of the day. Calvino slipped the camera back into his jacket.